Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Increasingly, Wall Street’s Regulators Have the Media Wandering About In a Maze of Hoops and Hurdles In Efforts to Obtain Public Documents Under Sunshine Laws
Getting what should already be public domain information from Wall Street’s regulators using the public records law known as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become next to impossible; and it’s fueling contempt for the Obama administration.
Yesterday, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that a majority of Americans, 54 percent, now believe the President is unable to “lead the country and get the job done.” That poll follows another one from NBC and the Wall Street Journal that was released on September 13 of last year which found that only 14 percent of Americans held a favorable view of Wall Street. Another Gallup poll released in May found that stock ownership among U.S. adults is at a 16-year low, reflecting a growing distrust of a level playing field on Wall Street after bestselling author of “Flash Boys,” Michael Lewis, appeared on 60 Minutes on March 30 to detail how high frequency traders and Wall Street banks had rigged the market against the small investor.
Against that backdrop, one would think that Wall Street regulators would be going out of their way to court public trust by courteously responding to public records requests with meaningful, responsive documents. But just the opposite is happening.
Take our experience just yesterday here at Wall Street On Parade. We had filed a request with the Securities and Exchange Commission for basic information about how a specific dark pool conducts its business, asking for a fee waiver routinely given to media outlets. Dark pools are unregulated stock exchanges operated by some of the largest banks on Wall Street, as well as by hedge funds and others. Congress is investigating how they may be rigging markets for personal benefit and the New York State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, has issued subpoenas and filed a recent case against Barclays for lying to its customers about the prevalence of high frequency traders in its dark pool.
At 8:50 a.m. yesterday morning, we received one and one-half pages of a single-spaced, typed letter via email from the SEC on the topic of a fee waiver to obtain the information. The letter advised that we had not met a six-prong test demonstrating “how the release of this information will contribute significantly to the public’s understanding of the SEC’s operation and activities.” However, “as a news media requester, you are entitled to search and review and the first 100 pages of duplication at no cost.”
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